Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

When the Czechoslovak StB officer Josef Frolik was posted to London in 1964, he was told that “the British service was so short of funds and men that it would be relatively easy to throw off their tails.” 95MI5’s job became even harder at the beginning of Voronin’s term as resident, in 1967, when one of his operations officers, Aleksei Nikolayevich Savin (codenamed RUSLAN), 96recruited a clerk in the Greater London Council (GLC) motor licensing department, Sirioj Husein Abdoolcader, who had access to the registration numbers of all Security Service and Special Branch vehicles. A series of sophisticated MI5 mobile surveillance operations was compromised by the ability of the London residency to identify the vehicles used. 97

The London residency’s greatest successes during the Brezhnev era were in scientific and technological intelligence (ST), particularly in the defense field. In 1967 Lopatin, the residency’s main ST expert in the mid-1960s, became one of the founders of a new FCD Directorate T, specializing in this field and serviced by Line X (ST) officers in residencies abroad. The head of Line X in London from the beginning of 1968 until his expulsion in the summer of 1971 was Lev Nikolayevich Sherstnev, a tough but amiable engineer who spoke almost flawless English with a Canadian accent and had a passion for Western hi-fi. 98

In addition to the veteran Norwood, Mitrokhin’s notes identify at least ten other Line X agents active in the late 1960s: MERCURY, a chemist recruited in 1958; 99SAKS, an employee of a British aircraft company, recruited in Germany, probably in 1964, “for material reward;” 100YUNG, an aeronautical and computer engineer recruited in 1965; 101NAGIN, a chemical engineer recruited in 1966; 102ACE, an aeronautical engineer recruited in 1967, who supplied voluminous documentation on aero engines and flight simulators; 103HUNT, the civil servant recruited by Norwood in 1967; 104AKHURYAN, a nuclear physicist recruited in 1968; 105STARIK, an aeronautical design engineer recruited in 1968; 106DAN, an engineer in the British subsidiary of an American company, recruited in 1969 “for material reward;” 107and STEP, a laboratory assistant recruited in 1969 for a monthly salary of 150 dollars. 108Mitrokhin’s notes also identify four further Line X agents operating in the 1970s who may well have been recruited in the 1960s: a virologist, a research scientist in a pharmaceutical laboratory, 109an engineer at a nuclear reactor, 110and COOPER, who worked in the new products department of a pharmaceutical company. 111

MI5 was hampered in its response to the upsurge of KGB and GRU ST operations not merely by its own overstretched resources but also by the difficulty (which it was, understandably, not anxious to advertise) of bringing successful prosecutions. Unless it could obtain confessions or catch agents in the act of handing over material, it was usually impossible to secure convictions. Its difficulties were exemplified by the trial in 1963 of Dr. Giuseppe Martelli, a 39-year-old Italian physicist employed for the previous year at the Culham Laboratories of the Atomic Energy Authority. Arrested as a result of a lead from a KGB defector, Martelli was found in possession of a record of meetings with Nikolai Karpekov and other KGB officers, a set of partly used one-time pads for cipher communications hidden inside an ingeniously constructed cigarette case, and instructions for photographing documents. But possession of espionage paraphernalia (unlike housebreaking equipment) is not in itself a crime and Martelli had no official access to classified information, though he was in contact with people who had. Martelli admitted meeting Karpekov, but claimed he was engaged in an ingenious scheme to turn the tables on a blackmail attempt by the KGB. He was acquitted. 112

During the mid- and late 1960s there were only two successful British prosecutions of Soviet spies in Britain. In 1965 Frank Bossard, a 52-year-old projects officer at the Ministry of Aviation was sentenced to twenty-one years in jail for passing top secret details of British guided weapon development to the GRU. An investigation after Bossard’s arrest revealed a criminal record which had never been properly investigated. Twenty years earlier he had served six months’ hard labor for fraud. In 1968 Douglas Britten, an RAF chief technician, was also sentenced to twenty-one years in jail for giving the KGB highly classified information from RAF signals units in Cyprus and Lincolnshire. A Security Commission inquiry after Britten’s conviction disclosed Britten’s history of financial problems and his record as an “accomplished liar.” 113

The work of Line X in the London residency was supplemented by KGB officers sent to Britain under cover either as members of trade and scientific delegations or as postgraduate students. Among the KGB postgraduates was A. V. Sharov of Directorate T, who began work for a PhD in engineering at London University in November 1966 and was awarded his doctorate on October 22, 1969. On KGB instructions, Sharov returned to London to take his degree in person in January 1971 and embark on a lecture tour arranged by the Academy of Sciences which was intended by the Centre to enable him to identify possible recruits in the scientific community. 114

Probably the most important Line PR postgraduate at a British university in the mid-1960s was Gennadi Fedorovich Titov (codenamed SILIN), who studied at University College, London. Titov went on to become resident in Norway in 1971 at the relatively youthful age of thirty-nine; 115in 1984 he was promoted to the rank of KGB general, and by the time of the 1991 coup ranked third in the KGB hierarchy. KGB officers and agents disguised as students were also used to uncover links between Western church groups and religious minorities in the Soviet Union. In September 1970 ABRAMOV (not identified in Mitrokhin’s notes) enrolled at a Baptist college in England, where he made contacts who revealed plans in Sweden and West Germany to smuggle religious literature into Russia by car, hidden in specially constructed secret compartments. 116

Since the demise of the Magnificent Five and the arrest of George Blake, the Centre had seen as the main weakness of its British operations its failure to recruit a new generation of young, ideologically committed high-flyers. The simple truth, which the Centre could not bring itself to accept, was that the Soviet Union had lost most of its former ideological appeal. The aging apparatchiks who ruled Brezhnev’s Soviet Union lacked the luster of both the interwar myth—image of the world’s first worker—peasant state and the far more accurate wartime image of the state which had been chiefly responsible for the defeat of Nazism. Most young Western radicals of the late 1960s were attracted not to ideologically servile Communist Parties but to the libertarian movements of the New Left. Moscow, however, refused to accept that this was more than a passing phase. The Centre sought to use the exploits of Kim Philby to inspire a new generation of radical idealists to follow his example.

On his defection to Moscow in 1963, Philby had been dismayed to discover that he held only agent status in the KGB, did not hold officer rank and was not even to be allowed to set foot inside the Lubyanka. For the first five years of his Moscow exile, however, he was kept occupied by long debriefing sessions, helping to ghostwrite the memoirs of Konon Molody (published under his alias “Gordon Lonsdale”) and writing a sprightly but tendentious memoir of his own career as a Soviet agent inside SIS, published in 1968 under the title of My Silent War. 117Philby made no mention of the disappointments of life in Moscow. Instead, he claimed that, “As I look over Moscow from my study window, I can see the solid foundations of the future I glimpsed at Cambridge.” Philby concluded his preface with words which were intended to inspire others: